Links to Outside Resources

Please find below links to some of our favorite resources for learning more about neuroscience. With each one, we include a brief explanation of what the site is and why we love it — if you know of other sites that we should be including, please let us know!

This is an extraordinarycollection put together by the Society for Neuroscience. There are ~1000 educational resources that have been reviewed by experts within the SfN. The database can be easily searched by: topic, educational level, resource type, author, average rating, and a number of other parameters. On the front page you’ll also find links to their most popular items (e.g. TED talks on neuroscience) and to other featured resources. If you’re looking for data on a specific subject, this is a fantastic first place to look.

This is a beautiful site sponsored by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The site includes the interactive 3-D Brain program, other interactive learning activities, and collections of articles & media that can be sorted by disorders and by different research approaches. Most of the items are relatively brief so it’s easy to scan through a large number of topics. This is a fantastic collection to browse and play with!

This is the home page for the Dana Foundation (tagline: “your gateway to responsible information about the brain”). My favorite parts of the website include: following the link at the top for “Educator’s and Researchers” — then click on “briefing papers” & “reports on progress” for a bunch of cool resources. The “Top Stories” section (front and center on the home page) is also fun to browse — the articles are generally written at a pretty basic / accessible level and provide a mini-intro to hot topics in neuroscience. The “Publications and Multimedia” also has a fun collection of materials. All in all: come here if you’re interested in high quality introductions to the hot topics in neuroscience that are currently garnering the most attention in the media.

For those interested in neurodevelopment, this is a brilliant place to start. It is an extraordinary collection, including: InBrief introductions/overviews to key topics; a great collection of Working Papers that provide in depth reviews of core concepts in neuro-development (and are extremely well written and accessible); and an impressive array of multimedia resources.
Top to bottom this site is just amazing.

This is a website funded by NIMH and supported by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation with some great resources on schizophrenia and schizophrenia research. It provides well written understandable science news on the latest findings in schizophrenia. It covers meetings such as the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics and the International Congress on Schizophrenia Research. Most useful to teachers and learners are resources such as “drugs in Trials” “what we know about schizophrenia” and “animal models.” These are great summaries of a very large literature. Finally the site offers Podcasts that are interviews with famous schizophrenia researchers describing their research.

NIMH Neuroscience and Psychiatry Teaching modules:

These online teaching modules, developed by Mayada Akil at NIMH, present case vignettes and video presentations on areas of neuroscience research relevant to clinicians.

The first module explores research on cognitive deficits, a core feature of schizophrenia, as an example of how translational neuroscience can provide clues for treatment development. It can be used in conjunction with the NNCI’s Cognition in Schizophrenia Neuroscience Lab

The second module describes animal models of fear that have informed human studies of fear/safety, anxiety, and anxiety disorders. It can be used in conjunction with the NNCI’s Find It, Draw It, Know It; Fear Circuitry.

NbN is an initiative spearheaded by leading researchers in psychopharmacology to help transform the way we describe our medications. All psychiatrists have likely experienced a version of the awkward conversation which can be caused by prescribing an “antipsychotic” to a non-psychotic patient. At times this can lead to resistance or non-adherence to treatment plans. Current categories can also mislead prescribers and patients into thinking a medicine has proven utility, when that may not be the case. An example is how “mood-stabilizers” actually vary widely in utility in the depressive and maintenance phases of bipolar disorder.

In order to help address these and other concerns, the NbN has created a new schema that classifies medications based on the pharmacological domains on which they act and on their specific mode of action. Their stated aims for the project are:

To provide a pharmacologically-driven (rather than indication-based) nomenclature that relies on a contemporary neuroscience understanding of how medicines act.

To help clinicians to make informed choices when they are trying to figure out what would be the next “pharmacological step.”

To decrease stigma and enhance adherence by a naming system that lays out the rationale for selecting a specific psychotropic.